This weekend, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is hosting a festival called Women of the World, which is all about every aspect of women’s lives and work and rights and struggles. What it’s not especially about is music. Is this a future for orchestras, establishing themselves in their communities by any means possible, including non-musical ones? My thoughts are in Friday’s Washington Post.

In January, the New Yorker ran an article by the pianist Jeremy Denk about the process of recording Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. It’s slightly unusual for an active musician to write a piece for a major publication — the norm is to have the musician speak through a journalist in the form of a profile. Denk, however, has no problem speaking for himself. His rise to prominence has arguably been spurred by his articulate, quirky, and very personal blog, Think Denk, in which he airs his thoughts about music, performance, the pieces he’s working on, and, often, the general wrong-headedness of the critic and program note annotators all around him.

Never heard of Joaquina Lapinha? Don’t worry. She was an obscure Brazilian soprano who briefly lit up the concert halls of Lisbon in the early 19th century. The closest she came to immortality was when a passing Swede caught her act and wrote, with admirable Scandinavian reserve, that she had a “good voice.”